We were well aware that Novell had put itself on the market, coyly winking at passers-by, displaying its... Assets. VMware was a contender, but things have played out entirely different: Novell has been bought by Attachmate Corp., with a Microsoft-led consortium buying unspecified intellectual property from Novell.

I'm sorry that I assumed people on an OS-dedicated site would have enough of a grasp of reality to understand that software patents MAKE NO SENSE.

suppose you are a developer working on a certain application and putting time (thus, money) into the study of a novel algorithm to maximise its efficiency - say, eg, a new data compression algorithm, possibly based on wavelets
suppose your application (at least the first releases) isn't exactly polished, since you being more of a researcher than an interface designer, cared more about the algorithm itself
now, wavelets being what they are, mostly any decent coder should be able to quickly enough reimplement your very same compression mechanism (and then add a shiny gui) after desuming it from your implementation
thus avoiding to spend on analysis and research the time and effort it took you to come up with the algorithm in the first instance
thus outcompeting you and your data compression application with an unfair advantage

sw patents don't make sense only in those fields where the rate of actual innovation is lowest
if you are a programmer/sw house working on actually innovative stuff and not some rehash of that from university /CS classes and books (ie what some call "public domain horizontal knowledge"), innovation you produce is an asset in itself
then, sw patents DO make sense...